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Book of Death: The Fall of Ninjak

In the ruins of his mansion, Colin King hunkers down as the last living member of Unity after the Third Armor Hunt – or so he thinks. A visit from an old friend and a peace offering present the chance for Ninjak to break the cycle of death and escape the horrible fate foretold in the Book of the Geomancer. Will he betray his dead friends or will THE FALL OF NINJAK come to pass and give rise to a very familiar future…

As the Book of Death series powers onwards ensnaring all in its wake this one shot, focusing on the final days of Valiant’s premier ninja character, shows what happens when the perfectly prepared man meets a challenge that may be beyond even him.

It’s an interesting point about Valiant that all views of the future of the universe shows devastation and near apocalypse level events that occur in an inevitably cyclical fashion. We know this, which means that the comics have to be all about the characters. In effect, it’s rarely the end of the world that we are meant to care about, merely the end of the characters’ worlds.

Which is the main problem of this comic. You can tell that this comic is meant to be a payoff to long standing relationships and perhaps a few plot arcs from comics in the past (not that it relates to anything in the current ongoing Ninjak series). Yet the way the comic is written means none of it really resonated with me, someone without that pre-existing knowledge. Thanks to some deft use of shading and colours the tone itself is very generally conveyed, but I never cared about Ninjak himself or any of the other characters.

Not that the art direction itself is something worth checking out exclusively for either (check out this month’s Ninjak #6 for that) being more in line with Valiant’s general house style.

In the end this is decidedly an average issue, a one shot of an event that the comic itself has barely anything to do with. For die hard fans of Ninjak or Valiant completists only.